Lesson 3: The Big Sleep -- The Birth of Philip Marlowe
"I am ... by tradition and long study a complete snob. P. Marlowe and I do not despise the upper classes because they take baths and have money; we despise them because they are phony."
—Raymond Chandler, in a letter to editor Dale Warren, dated 1945
In this lesson, we'll begin our in-depth analysis of what many consider to be Chandler's best novel, The Big Sleep. We'll study its plot, characterization, definitive style, and themes. In Lesson 2, you learned to trace Chandler's evolution as a writer through his development of the hero. In this lesson, as we anaylze The Big Sleep, we will pay particular attention to Philip Marlowe, Private Eye, the most significant character in all of Chandler's fiction.
Themes in The Big Sleep
As we’ve seen in previous lessons, historical events occurring contemporaneously with the development of hard-boiled crime fiction had a major influence on that development.
Marlowe is continually depicted as the modern moral knight, embodying antiquated virtues of honor, chivalry, and courage.
On the other hand, it was, nevertheless, a fairly common practice for mystery writers of this era to avoid topical references in their work. For example, in Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason novels, all of which appeared between 1933 and 1970, there is rarely a reference to current events, such as Prohibition, the Depression, the War, the Red Scare, or the Cuban Missile Crisis. Consequently, Mason and the rest of his cohorts can be featured in dozens of novels over nearly four decades without aging noticeably, and a Mason novel written in the 1930s doesn’t seem much different from one written in the 1960s. Discerning readers, of course, may detect differences in style, social norms, slang expressions, and so on, but these are details that tend to occur under the surface. The Mason books have a deliberately timeless quality that has helped keep them continuously in print during Gardner’s lifetime and beyond (which was precisely Gardner’s intent).
By contrast, other writers made a point of taking note of social events. Author Rex Stout, for example, allowed his characters, Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin, to participate in the repeal of Prohibition, World War II, the McCarthy Era, and, in the final novel of the series, Watergate. All this time, Wolfe and Goodwin didn’t age a single day.
Chandler steered a middle course, at least in The Big Sleep. Certain details definitely suggest a particular era. For example, Rusty Regan is described as not merely a former criminal, but as a former bootlegger, clearly indicating that Prohibition is still a recent memory. But while Chandler included topical references, he did not depend on them for his central plots.
Chandler built his stories not around current events, but around universal themes. For example, one of the themes in The Big Sleep is corruption—both the corruption of officials and the corrupting influence of wealth. In the opening of The Big Sleep, Marlowe informs us that he’s wearing his best suit because he’s "calling on four million dollars." Marlowe distrusts the wealthy, and his characterization of a potential client by nothing more than the amount of money he has at his disposal, without regard to any other qualities he might possess, suggests that he’s preparing himself to dislike his new employer sight unseen. Significantly, we will see that Marlowe is repeatedly described as a worker (a $25-per-day laborer), and Chandler continually places him in direct contrast to the rich, immoral, leisure-seeking clients he serves.
In Lesson 1, we discussed the prevalence of official corruption in Chandler’s early stories; in Lesson 2, we looked at Chandler’s use of setting and how he used it to enhance the atmosphere of corruption. Now we are beginning to see the fullness of this theme in Chandler’s work, and how he used many techniques to paint a portrait of the unsavory, the sordid, and the immoral.
Although the term wasn’t in vogue in 1939, Marlowe’s clients, the Sternwoods, are a textbook example of what is now called a "dysfunctional family." Marlowe’s job in this novel is as much to get the family functioning correctly as it is the suppression of a blackmailer or the unearthing of a missing person. He’s almost as much a therapist as he is a detective. Dysfunctional families are a device as old as literature. One need go no further than the story of Cain and Abel in the Bible’s Book of Genesis for an early example. Other instances can be found in Greco-Roman mythology, Shakespeare, Dickens, Dumas, and, not surprisingly, Hammett. One of Chandler’s most devoted disciples, Ross Macdonald (sometimes referred to as the "Holy Spirit" of hard-boiled private eye fiction, to Hammett’s "Father" and Chandler’s "Son"), made the untangling of familial messes something of a specialty in his Lew Archer novels.
Now that we’ve discussed some of Chandler’s overarching themes, bear them in mind as you continue your reading, and notice the ways in which he continually introduces these themes into his work. In the Discussion Questions section of this lesson, you will have a chance to share your ideas about some of Chandler’s other themes with your fellow classmates. In the next topic, we’ll look more closely at the character of Philip Marlowe; as we will see, he himself was the embodiment of some of Chandler’s main themes.
Lecture 2
Lesson 3: The Big Sleep -- The Birth of Philip Marlowe
The Hero: "A Man Fit for Adventure"
Another recurring theme is Marlowe’s tendency to emulate the knights of old. He seems to be beholden to a powerful personal code of ethics, and he feels a responsibility to protect the helpless and innocent. We’ve seen this inclination in the short stories, and we’ll see it to a greater degree in the novels.
In the last topic, we discussed the prevalence of corruption in Chandler’s work. The corruption in Chandler’s fictional world does not go unchallenged; his hero stands as a brave and independent soldier fighting the good fight on the side of morality, honesty, and fair play. Chandler’s choice of a name for his hero was telling: "Philip Marlowe" evoked the English Renaissance poet Christopher Marlowe, as well as the influence of Chandler's classical education. This character is central to Chandler’s body of work, and we’ll devote this lesson to studying him. As Chandler said, "He is the hero, he is everything."
Pay particular attention to the discussion of the stained glass window in the opening scenes of The Big Sleep, as it sums up many of the significant themes in the novel.
It was significant to Chandler that his hero embody the chivalrous qualities of a knight. He described him as "a man of honor, by instinct, inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it." Within the urban chaos, depravity, and lawlessness of Chandler’s stories, the moral center remains intact because of his hero.
Notice the opening of The Big Sleep. Marlowe examines a stained glass window in the rich man’s house that depicts a knight rescuing a damsel in distress. "I stood there and thought that if I lived in the house, I would sooner or later have to climb up there and help him. He didn’t seem to be really trying," Marlowe says. Note the implied self-reliance, the expectation of valor and bravery. As literary critics have pointed out, Chandler created a popular rule of crime fiction that has become a mainstay of the genre: We expect the individual hero of the story to mete out justice and save the day, rather than expecting the law or the community to provide it.
At the same time, Marlowe seems to poke fun at his own identification with knightly virtues, sensing that those kinds of ideals might be out of place in gangster-ridden Los Angeles. His remark about the stained glass window seems to simultaneously mark his habit of identifying with knightly characters, and humorously dismiss the idea as inappropriate. Later on, he’ll be even more acerbic, cynically noting that the game he’s playing "isn’t a game for knights." Yet despite his outward cynicism, Marlowe’s chivalric characteristics always shine through.
It’s also significant that in this longer form, Chandler is able to further develop Marlowe’s character and offer more insight into him. When introduced to his new client, General Guy Sternwood, Marlowe is perhaps a bit surprised to find himself liking the irascible old man, crippled and near death, but still full of inner strength and a defiant attitude. Perhaps he sees in Sternwood a kindred spirit. As he gives the General a brief résumé of his career, and admits that he was fired from his position as a DA’s investigator for talking back to his superiors, Marlowe tells him, "I test fairly high on insubordination, General." The General replies, "I always did myself, sir." They are, as Marlowe suspected, kindred spirits.
This exchange with the General marks the first time we’ve heard that Marlowe once had a career in official law enforcement, a career that was derailed by his own refusal to try to fit into an institutional structure. This glimpse into Marlowe’s past explains much that was left unexplored in the short stories that we examined in the last lesson. First of all, we now know where Marlowe learned his trade. There is nothing too surprising there; a man has to learn the rudiments of his profession somewhere, and if your profession is detective work, you can gain your on-the-job training either as a policeman or as an employee of a large detective agency. Because of Marlowe’s stubborn refusal to conform, he was unable to succeed as a member of a team. He is a loner, from his first appearance in print to his last.
As The Big Sleep unfolds, we’ll see a few examples of official corruption (although it’s a fairly minor element in this novel compared to some of Chandler’s later works). Consequently, we may be tempted to infer that Marlowe’s steely integrity rebelled at the ethical compromises he had to make as a policeman. But Chandler also shows us tough, straight cops, like Marlowe’s friend and former colleague, Chief Investigator Bernie Ohls (who we met in "Finger Man" in the previous lesson), or Captain Gregory, head of LAPD’s Missing Persons Detail. Characters like these, and like Lieutenant Ybarra in "Red Wind," suggest that, in Chandler’s world, while it may be difficult for an honest man to be an honest cop, it’s not at all impossible. But it is impossible for Marlowe, despite his obvious talent as an investigator, to succeed in law enforcement. This is due less to his integrity than to his stubborn refusal to do things anybody’s way but his own.
This is a key insight into the kind of man Marlowe is. He isn’t just uncompromising on matters of ethics, but on nearly everything, with a prickly pride that’s easily ruffled, a sharp tongue always ready to counter any perceived insult, and a pair of ready fists if an adroitly phrased wisecrack doesn’t silence an adversary. This insistence on being his own man, coupled with a failed background in police work, make Marlowe the template for the scores of fictional ex-cops-turned-PIs who will follow in Marlowe’s wake. (We’ll examine this point at greater length later in the course.)
Marlowe was Chandler’s consummate hero, as we’ve seen, and Chandler once described the mystery story as the protagonist’s "adventure in search of a hidden truth." He went on to say that the story "would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure." Marlowe, he said, is a man who "has a range of awareness that startles you, but it belongs to him by right because it belongs to the world he lives in."
Marlowe is a man to whom things happen, and he is a man who makes things happen. He attracts trouble and he causes trouble. But whether he causes it or attracts it, he can always handle it, because, as he tells us in a story we covered in the last lesson, "Trouble is my business." In The Big Sleep, he has plenty of trouble. In just the first half, he’s faced with two definite murders, one suspicious death that may or may not be a murder, one missing person who might turn out to have been murdered, and at least two murderers working at cross-purposes.
As we’ve already seen, Marlowe has an unyielding pride that causes him to be sarcastic, overbearing, quick to take offense, and impatient to the point of alienating others, even clients. He takes no man’s insolence, but he dishes out plenty of his own.
All of this is part of the shield he must put up to survive in the world in which he lives. He has to be hard and unyielding. As he puts it in Playback, "If I wasn’t hard, I wouldn’t be alive." And that hardness, that steely resolve, is part of what makes him a man "fit for adventure."
But only part. Marlowe can also be tender. In that same book, he goes on to say, "If I couldn’t ever be gentle, I wouldn’t deserve to be alive." Marlowe is a compassionate man. He sees his mission, whether he puts it this way or not, less as solving puzzles than as helping people. He likes the General, partly because he sees in the General something of himself, but also because the General is someone who’s helpless, someone who needs the kind of help a man like Marlowe can provide.
In our next lesson, we’ll see the tension between the detective as puzzle-solver and the detective as compassionate rescuer of the helpless come to a head, as Marlowe uncovers the solution to Rusty Regan’s disappearance and gets the General and his family out from under the thumb of a vicious gangster.
Lesson 3: The Big Sleep -- The Birth of Philip Marlowe
The Evolution of The Big Sleep
Chandler used an interesting method to develop the plots for his novels: He recycled and combined the plots of his previously published short stories. By developing his novels in this manner, he was able to take what he’d already learned about plotting and storytelling in the pulps and apply it to a new form that allowed greater space for the kind of tough yet lyrical style that would become his hallmark. In this topic, we’ll take a closer look at that method as it was used in The Big Sleep.
The practice of taking a previously published short story and expanding it to novel length was certainly not unheard of in crime fiction by the time Chandler wrote The Big Sleep. Early examples include R. Austin Freeman’s 1912 novel The Mystery of 31 New Inn, which was expanded from a short story called "31 New Inn" published the previous year, and Marie Belloc Lowndes’s 1913 fictionalization of the Jack the Ripper case, The Lodger, a full-length version of a short story that had appeared in McClure’s in 1911.
The Method
Since Chandler was striking out on new ground by attempting book-length fiction, it must have seemed logical to use material with which he was familiar. In the case of The Big Sleep, he combined and expanded two Carmady stories from Black Mask, "Killer in the Rain" (January 1935) and "The Curtain" (September 1936). Chandler called this process "cannibalizing."
In "Killer in the Rain," Carmady is hired by oil millionaire Tony Dravec to free his adopted daughter, Carmen, from the power of a shady blackmailer. The blackmailer turns out to be a pornographer who operates a rental library of high-class smut behind the facade of a rare books shop, but before Carmady gets too far on the case, the blackmailer is killed. Now Carmady must solve a murder in order to keep his client out of trouble.
In "The Curtain," Carmady is hired by a wheelchair-bound retired general to find his missing son-in-law. The son-in-law had apparently grown weary of his marriage to the General’s daughter, and of being a surrogate father to the General’s grandson, and had taken up with the wife of a local mobster. Since the mobster’s wife is also missing, it appears as though the two might have simply run off together. But when Carmady traces the wife to an out-of-the-way mechanic’s garage in nearby Realito, he finds that the truth behind the disappearance is very different.
As you’ve no doubt surmised, what Chandler does, in broad terms, is combine the blackmail investigation from "Killer in the Rain" with the missing persons investigation from "The Curtain" to create the plot of The Big Sleep.
Investigation:
Uncovering Corruption
In your close reading of the text, find an additional instance in which you can directly trace Chandler’s continuing commentary on corruption in The Big Sleep. Post your findings to the message board, and discuss with other students.
Redundant characters are jettisoned. Hence oilman Tony Dravec is eliminated, and the actions he performs in "Killer in the Rain" are assigned to the General, whose role is appropriately expanded. Similarly, the grandson from "The Curtain" is excised, and the General is instead given a younger daughter—Carmen from "Killer in the Rain"—whose role is likewise expanded so that she performs both her own actions from "Killer in the Rain" and the grandson’s from "The Curtain."
In constructing the novel, Chandler lifted scenes, virtually intact, from one story or the other, and expanded those scenes into chapters for the book. Since the two stories have completely different, unrelated plotlines, Chandler also wrote new, wholly original chapters, fusing those separate plots into a cohesive entity.
To help you understand Chandler’s so-called "cannibalization" method, let’s compare two paragraphs, one from "The Curtain" and its expanded version from The Big Sleep. Both describe the steamy greenhouse where the detective meets his client, the General.
In "The Curtain" the passage appears this way:
The air steamed. The walls and ceiling of the glass house dripped. In the half light enormous tropical plants spread their blooms and branches all over the place, and the smell of them was almost as overpowering as the smell of boiling alcohol.
Set free from the space constraints of the short story, the expanded passage in The Big Sleep appears this way:
The air was thick, wet, steamy and larded with the cloying smell of tropical orchids in bloom. The glass walls and roof were heavily misted and big drops of moisture splashed down on the plants. The light had an unreal greenish color, like light filtered through an aquarium tank. The plants filled the place, a forest of them, with nasty meaty leaves and stalks like the newly washed fingers of dead men. They smelled as overpowering as boiling alcohol under a blanket.
As Chandler scholar Philip Durham points out in an introduction to a posthumous collection of Chandler’s short fiction, "Both passages are intense and vivid." The paragraph from the short story, showing the influence of Hammett, "achieves its effectiveness though terseness..." while the passage from the novel "create[s] a mood through the use of hyperbole and striking simile." In lessons to come, we’ll continue to explore how this method contributed to the development of Chandler’s style and his gift for setting atmosphere through description and dialogue.
Chandler’s Misgivings
Chandler would ultimately write two more novels using the same method—Farewell, My Lovely, which we will examine in upcoming lessons, and The Lady in the Lake. However, he was never really comfortable with writing novels in this fashion, as his term for the process, "cannibalization," indicates. As mentioned in the previous lesson, it was for this reason that Chandler rarely allowed his cannibalized stories to be reprinted during his lifetime. They were all deliberately excluded from his "official" short story collection, The Simple Art of Murder.
It was not until five years after his death that these stories were finally preserved between hard covers in the collection Killer in the Rain and Other Stories. Philip Durham edited the book and wrote an introduction (from which his comments above are quoted) in which he described Chandler’s mixed feelings about the stories he developed into books.
However Chandler felt about the process, it became a model subsequent mystery writers would follow in later years. For example, Lawrence Block’s award-winning short story about New York City private investigator Matt Scudder, "By the Dawn’s Early Light," was expanded into the Scudder novel When the Sacred Ginmill Closes. John Lutz’s "Ride the Lightning," which, like Block’s story, won the Edgar Award for best short fiction from the Mystery Writers of America, was expanded into an identically titled novel featuring St. Louis PI Alo Nudger. And perhaps no contemporary mystery writer has used the Chandler method of short story expansion more often than pulp fan and award-winning novelist Bill Pronzini, most recently in the San Francisco-set private eye novel Bleeders, deriving from "The Big Bite" and "Home Is the Place Where." As we have seen, Chandler’s method, as much as his actual work, became a template for mystery writers who came after.
In this lesson, we’ve studied Philip Marlowe’s emergence and development as the central character in Chandler’s oeuvre, and we’ve seen how Marlowe has contributed to the development of the modern detective hero. In the next lesson, we’ll continue our analysis of The Big Sleep, and learn about some of Chandler’s other contributions to the genre, including the use of recurring characters.
Discussion
Please post your responses to the topics below on the message board.
1. Now that you know that The Big Sleep’s blackmail plot derived from one story and the missing persons plot from another, it may seem obvious that the novel was constructed from two unrelated pieces of fiction. If you didn’t already know this, do you think it would have been as obvious? Why or why not?
2. Once Chandler decided to make Marlowe an ex-cop, why do you think he chose the specific position of DA’s investigator as the PI’s former law enforcement position? Why not a former LAPD officer or a former deputy sheriff?
3. Chandler once said that he thought novels, rather than short stories, were his natural medium. Having read the first half of this novel and seven of his short stories, do you agree or disagree with Chandler’s self-assessment? Explain.
4. We’ve discussed themes in The Big Sleep. In your reading of the novel, did you identify additional themes that seemed significant? Share your ideas on the message board.
Lesson 4: The Big Sleep -- Between the Lines
"The private detective of fiction is a fantastic creation who acts and speaks like a real man. He can be completely realistic in every sense but one, that one sense being that in life as we know it such a man would not be a private detective."
—Raymond Chandler, in a letter dated 1951
In our last lesson, we examined the first half of Chandler’s The Big Sleep. Our study of this novel in these two lessons will lead us to a fuller understanding of Chandler, both as an artist and as a significant figure in contemporary American fiction.
The Big Sleep is often described as Chandler’s best novel. As Chandler scholar Robert Moss said, "The story is structurally and thematically unified, the characters fully developed, and the style distinctive and sharp. . . Chandler's style and technique would be widely admired and imitated; his work would help establish the conventions of the genre that persist (in both detective novels and movies) to this day."
Social and Literary Contexts
Goverment agents are shown confiscating liquor during Prohibition. The movement had widespread influence on the culture, and the fiction, of the times.
Image courtesy of the Library of Congress.
In Lesson 3, we watched as Marlowe became engulfed in a crooked town in a case involving blackmail, murder, pornography, and organized crime. As we’ve learned, the logistics of plotting were never Chandler’s strong suit, and, more importantly, plot was not central to Chandler’s aesthetic. Unlike the formulaic mysteries of the Golden Age, which featured a satisfying and obligatory "whodunit," the unraveling of the mystery in The Big Sleep is almost (although not quite) beside the point. Chandler was much more interested in commenting on the corruption of the modern world, moving the story along through fast pacing, creating powerfully atmospheric settings, and using language in exciting and effective ways.
As Chapter 19 opens, Marlowe has, for practical purposes, completed the assignment given to him by General Sternwood: He's removed the threat of blackmail from Sternwood's younger daughter, Carmen, and retrieved the blackmail material. Along the way, he solved a couple of murders, but that was incidental. Nonetheless, former bootlegger Rusty Regan, husband of Sternwood's older daughter, Vivian, is still missing, and so is Mona Mars, wife of racketeer Eddie Mars. It's commonly believed that Regan and Mona ran off together.
The General had developed deep affection for his son-in-law, and his sudden, unexplained disappearance has grieved him deeply. And, though he didn't come right out and say so, he was afraid that Regan might have been involved, behind the scenes, in the blackmail attempt. Marlowe tries to uncover the truth, in part to set the General's mind at ease.
Marlowe learns that Eddie Mars seems to have some kind of hold over the Sternwoods, and no one—not Vivian Regan, not Eddie Mars, not local law enforcement—seems to want him looking into Regan's disappearance. Although finding Regan is not his assignment, everyone seems to assume that's what Marlowe is doing.
All Carmen seems to want is a roll in the hay with Marlowe. She even bribes her way into Marlowe's apartment, and climbs into his bed naked, certain that the tall, handsome detective will succumb to her charms. When he throws her out of his home, she doesn't take it well.
A man named Harry Jones tells Marlowe he knows where Mona can be found, and offers to sell the information to Marlowe. Before the deal can be closed, however, Jones is killed by Mars's enforcer, Lash Canino, while Marlowe watches helplessly from an adjoining room. Marlowe is able to get the information about Mona's whereabouts from Jones's girlfriend, and is soon on his way to the rural town of Realito, where Mona is hiding out in a country garage, in the care of Canino.
Marlowe is recognized by Canino and captured, but, with the help of Mona, he escapes, retrieves a gun from his car, and kills Canino in a shootout. Marlowe reports all this to the General, who tells him that, whether or not he's been warned off by the cops, he should stay on the case until Regan is found.
Carmen, still furious at Marlowe for his rejection of her sexual advances, tries to kill him. She's not successful, but Marlowe suddenly realizes that the same thing must have happened with Regan. Carmen made advances; Regan rejected them; Carmen, in a fury, tried to kill him. In Regan's case, her attempt was successful.
Vivian, as we learn, knew this all along. She arranged with Eddie Mars to dispose of the body, and this is what put her under Mars' thumb. Marlowe gives Vivian an ultimatum: If, in the next three days, Vivian gets Carmen into a hospital, he will, for the General's sake, keep quiet about Regan's murder. Vivian agrees. Marlowe, now "part of the nastiness" growing out of the cover-up, walks off the Sternwood estate and out of their lives.
Now that we've concluded the novel in this lesson, we can recognize the ways in which Chandler uses his characters to help set the mood, create atmosphere, and convey his artistic vision to readers. And, as we’ll see, Chandler’s use of characters helped to establish some of the conventions of crime fiction, including the use of recurring characters and significant character types.
"Sordid" is a word that frequently comes to mind in describing Chandler’s world, and an analysis of the text shows that it is not just the plot elements (pornography, drug use, gambling, grifting, murder, and so on), but also the cast of characters that fosters this impression. Chandler was extremely effective at creating characters who served his greater artistic vision. Consider the following descriptions of characters in The Big Sleep.
Carmen is described as "small and delicately put together, but she looked durable," with "little sharp predatory teeth." Her father says she is "a child who likes to pull the wings off flies," and she’s compared to "a bad girl in the principal’s office." Her laughter "ran around the corners of the room like rats behind the wainscoting." Later, we’re told that "Carmen was crawling around on her hands and knees, still hissing." These references, which draw comparisons between Carmen and a wild child or an animal, both foreshadow her actions and create a vivid portrait of recklessness and wildness.
Notice the differences between Carmen and Vivian. Vivian is introduced as more poised and adult than her sister, but no less dangerous. Marlowe tells us, "She was worth a stare. She was trouble." Meeting Marlowe for the first time, Vivian reclines with her slippers off, in sheer silk stockings, showing her legs above the knee. Such sexually suggestive body language, although tame by modern standards, was meant to instruct readers about Vivian’s character; nice matrons in pre-World War II America did not receive strange men in private quarters while displaying their legs and drinking liquor. Note the difference in Chandler’s description of Vivian’s maid: "She looked like a nice old horse that had been turned out to pasture after long service."
Chandler doesn't resort to clichéd descriptions. For example, instead of telling us that Carmen is unintelligent, he writes, "She was thinking. I could see, even on that short acquaintance, that thinking was always going to be a bother to her." Marlowe recounts his fight with young Carol Lundgren and tells us that "a pansy has no iron in his bones, no matter what he looks like." Geiger is described as "that queen" and "like Caesar, a husband to women and a wife to men." (Note that with this sly allusion to Caesar, Chandler tips his hat to his elite education.)
From this vantage point in history, we can see that Chandler was an artist who was later emulated and copied (to the point of parody). In upcoming lessons, we’ll look at some of the writers who walked in his footsteps. It may be surprising to realize that when Chandler was writing, his influence and significance were not acknowledged or understood. When The Big Sleep was published, The New York Times Book Review said, "Most of the characters in this book are tough, many are nasty and some of them are both." It is interesting to note that many of Chandler’s critics did not initially acknowledge him as a writer of significance. Although the book’s popular appeal and sales were strong, it would be years before The Big Sleep received the critical acclaim that it deserved. Some modern critics have suggested that as much as Marlowe was at heart a chivalrous knight out of place in a corrupt modern world, Chandler saw himself as a poet, underappreciated in the world of genre fiction.
Lesson 4: The Big Sleep -- Between the Lines
The Supporting Cast: Recurring Characters
The recurring character, the series character, is the bulwark of crime fiction. Of course, there are successful and highly acclaimed mysteries that feature a lead character who appears in only one book or story, but the series character, appearing in tale after tale, has been the rule since detective fiction was first conceived. Arguably, the series character predates crime fiction. Shakespeare, for example, wrote a trilogy of plays about England’s King Henry V, two set during his tenure as the Prince of Wales, and one during his reign as king. James Fenimore Cooper wrote four novels about heroic frontiersman Nathaniel Bumpo.
One reason for the use of a recurring hero is, of course, commercialism. A character who is popular in one book, play, or story, is likely to be popular in sequels. Another reason is the opportunity to explore different facets of the lead character.
The mainstay of a crime fiction series is, of course, that continuing lead character. This tradition, as we said, goes all the way back to the very beginnings of crime fiction, with the lead character of Edgar Allan Poe’s pioneering trilogy of mystery short stories, an amateur detective named C. Auguste Dupin. Dupin debuted in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (generally regarded as the first genuine mystery story) and returned in two sequels, "The Mystery of Marie Roget" and "The Purloined Letter."
Through these stories, Poe set the precedent that the main character in the mystery series has a network of recurring supporting characters. A nameless first-person narrator shares living quarters with Dupin and performs much of the legwork, allowing Dupin to focus on solving the crimes, and providing a model for later characters like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Dr. Watson in the Sherlock Holmes stories, or Agatha Christie’s Captain Hastings in the Hercule Poirot stories. Dupin’s law enforcement contact is Prefect G-, the head of the Paris Police, prefiguring characters like Conan Doyle’s Inspector Lestrade or Dorothy L. Sayers’s Inspector Charles Parker. After all, detective characters who are not part of official law enforcement will, of necessity, come in contact with police officers in the course of their investigations, and it makes sense for them to have regular contacts.
It also makes sense for lead characters to be backed up by a regular supporting cast, to give them people with whom they can regularly interact. For example, despite his name, the Lone Ranger was given a partner, "faithful Indian companion Tonto," largely so he would have someone to talk to.
Hammett certainly followed this trend. His most frequently used series detective, the Continental Op, is backed by a fairly large number of recurring characters. Some of these include "The Old Man," his boss at the San Francisco Office of the Continental Detective Agency; fellow Continental Operatives, such as burly Irishman Mickey Linehan and rookie PI Bob Teal (whose murder the Op avenges about halfway through the series); and the Op’s SFPD contacts, Sergeant O’Gar and Detective Pat Reddy.
Brett Halliday’s long series of novels and short stories featuring Miami PI Mike Shayne also include a large, well-developed supporting cast of recurring characters. Shayne, a tough, hard-nosed sleuth in the Hammett-Chandler mold, made his book-length debut at roughly the same time as Marlowe, in 1939’s Dividend on Death. Among the many supporting characters are love interests Phyllis Brighton and Lucy Hamilton; Shayne’s friendly law enforcement contact, Miami Chief of Police Will Gentry; his unfriendly law enforcement nemesis, Miami Beach Chief of Detectives Peter Painter; and his reporter buddy, Tim Rourke of the Miami Daily News.
Investigation:
Researching Character
In your close reading of the text, find an specific instance in which you see Chandler effectively using a character to set the mood and create atmosphere. Post your example to the message board, and discuss your findings with other students.
Unlike his contemporaries, Chandler didn't rely on many recurring characters in the Marlowe stories. Anne Riordan, who we’ll meet in the next lesson, is a pretty cop’s daughter who occasionally assists Marlowe in his investigations (and, it is hinted, is an occasional romantic interest of Marlowe’s). She is introduced in 1940’s Farewell, My Lovely, and doesn’t reappear until 1959 in Chandler’s final Marlowe entry, "The Pencil." Linda Loring, a beautiful, wealthy divorcée who falls in love with Marlowe, first appears in 1953’s The Long Goodbye, and, while not actually appearing onstage (unless you count a phone call), is something of a gray eminence in the final completed Marlowe novel, 1958’s Playback. (In Chandler’s uncompleted and possibly abandoned Marlowe novel, Poodle Springs, Loring and Marlowe are married.)
Another recurring character in the series is Bernie Ohls. A tough, straight, instinctively honest and uncomplicated cop, Ohls makes his first appearance in the 1933 short story "Finger Man," which we covered in Lesson 2. We meet him again in The Big Sleep. He’s mentioned in Farewell, My Lovely and The High Window, but he doesn’t actually appear again until 1953’s The Long Goodbye, and later in the 1959 short story, "The Pencil." Although Ohls appears in two novels and two short stories, we learn almost nothing about him personally apart from the somewhat prickly friendship he and Marlowe share, and yet, aside from Marlowe, he is the most frequently recurring character in the saga.
Chandler’s vision of Marlowe as the consummate loner may be the main reason he resisted the trend of introducing recurring supporting characters to his series. Nevertheless, he apparently found he couldn’t eliminate them completely, and it’s interesting that his last completed Marlowe project, "The Pencil," includes two recurring characters. It’s as if, at the end of his career, Chandler had finally succumbed to the trend.
In today’s series mysteries, with their emphasis on relationships and the private lives of the main characters, the use of a large supporting cast is more common than ever. Robert B. Parker’s Spenser, for example, whom Parker has been entirely forthright about describing as, essentially, "Marlowe in Boston," has a regular girlfriend, Susan Silverman, and two police contacts, Lt. Quirk and Sgt. Belson. Most significantly, he has a contact in the criminal underworld, a professional thug named Hawk who sometimes assists Spenser on his cases, doing the nasty, violent things that Spenser is too virtuous to do.
Lesson 4: The Big Sleep -- Between the Lines
Character Types: Setting the Trend
While Chandler usually avoided repeating the same characters, he liked using recurring character types, or similar types of characters with different names. Crime fiction stories, like any other kind of literature, have recurring character types that can be found in almost any typical example of the form. The Big Sleep has its share of such characters. Indeed, it might be argued that Chandler established the use of certain character types in The Big Sleep, and that he set the standard for later writers who used the Chandler mold. Let's explore some of the recurring character types that Chandler used, and trace their legacy in other writers’ work.
The Big-Time Mobster
The big-time mobster was among Chandler’s favorite characters. He was fascinated by what he called the "hoodlum empire that infests this country." In a letter to James Sandoe, the mystery critic for the New York Herald-Tribune, Chandler talked at length about the 1951 U.S. Congressional investigation of organized crime, presided over by Senator Estes Kefauver and televised across the country. "Obviously nothing that a mystery writer could dream up could be more fantastic than what actually goes on," he wrote.
Al Capone was only one of the many real-life big-time mobsters depicted in fictionalized noir characters.
Chandler’s work reflected his times, and, in The Big Sleep, Eddie Mars is a prime example of the big-time mobster. Mars, like most incarnations of the type, is well-dressed and almost courtly in manner, but ruthless in business. Other examples of the big-time mobster appear in short stories like "Finger Man," "Trouble Is My Business," and "Spanish Blood." The type appears In Farewell, My Lovely as Laird Brunette, in 1949’s The Little Sister as "Weepy" Steelgrave, and in The Long Goodbye as Mendy Menendez.
We are introduced to Mars with this description: "He was a gray man, all gray, except for his polished black shoes and two scarlet diamonds in his gray satin tie that looked like the diamonds on roulette layouts." Mars is a hard man, but not rough; he’s articulate and sometimes polite, with a "nice easy smile" and gray eyes that twinkle. Mars is a professional: He uses a team of henchmen to carry out his crimes, but he doesn’t get his hands dirty himself. "I knew Eddie Mars would bleed me white," says Vivian, and she warns Marlowe: "He’ll try to kill you."
In later fiction, we don’t have to look hard to find the offspring of Chandler’s crime boss character. The most famous are, of course, Don Vito Corleone and his son, Michael, in Mario Puzo’s The Godfather. We can also include Dixie Costello, the head of organized crime in a series of Manchester-set police novels by retired British cop Maurice Procter; Philadelphia’s top mobster, Mike Lagana, in William P. McGivern’s hard-boiled classic, The Big Heat; and California Mafioso "Flip" Fazzini (a loose fictionalization of real-life gangster Jimmy "The Weasel" Frattiano) in Final Notice, by former San Francisco private eye Joe Gores.
The Aristocratic Client
The aristocratic client is another recurring character type in Chandler’s fiction, and although Marlowe considers himself a working class stiff, he manages to find wealthy, aristocratic clients quite frequently. This character type always acts a bit huffy and superior, and tends to come off second best when matching words with the prideful Marlowe. The aristocratic client is a necessary character, as he gives the hero entrance to a world of money, power, and high-stakes crime. Examples include Old Man Jeeter in "Trouble Is My Business," Mr. Grayle in Farewell, My Lovely, and Mrs. Elizabeth Bright Murdock in The High Window. Sometimes these characters are unremittingly unsympathetic; occasionally, they turn out to be downright sinister.
The Big Sleep’s General Sternwood, however, is a fairly benevolent specimen of the type. Although moneyed and mannered, the crippled old man is, at heart, tough as old shoes. Despite his wealth, a condition of which Marlowe is always suspicious, Sternwood is somewhat redeemed by his past military career. When the General detects in another the heart of a warrior, what his servant calls "the soldier’s eye," he sees that person as having worth, whatever his economic class. Therefore, Sternwood instinctively likes Marlowe, and Marlowe instinctively likes him, and does his best for him.
A more malignant example of the aristocratic client can be found in Dashiell Hammett’s 1928 novel, Red Harvest, the first book-length appearance of the Continental Op. Here the Op is hired by Elihu Wilson to clean up the gangster-ridden small town of Personville. Wilson, a ruthless mine owner who is himself responsible for the town’s infestation by gangsters, having brought them in to break a strike, is as morally corrupt as any of the gang elements the Op pits against each other, but is similar to the General in that he is elderly, rich, and frail.
The Spoiled But Likeable Rich Girl
Chandler frequently used characters that fit the mold of the spoiled but likeable rich girl. Recall that Chandler was a product of the Depression, when the differences between rich and poor were as striking as at any point in American history. The spoiled but likeable rich girl character certainly struck a chord with Chandler’s readers. Marlowe, the epitome of the working class guy, is often put in direct contact with the moneyed, immoral upper class, creating some of the most interesting conflicts in Chandler’s fiction. We’ll see the spoiled but likeable rich girl character again when we meet wealthy heiress Linda Loring. Marlowe despises the easy luxury Loring’s wealth has always brought her, and she, in turn, despises the shabbiness of his lifestyle and business. Yet they each recognize enough worth in the other to, at least for a time, reach across the boundaries that separate them and become a couple.
In The Big Sleep, the spoiled but likeable rich girl character appears as the General’s older daughter, Vivian Regan: a beautiful, wealthy, pampered babe who’s been spoiled by the privilege in which she’s been raised. She’s promiscuous, drinks too much, gambles too much, and generally lives an aimless and pointless life. Yet she’s protective of her family, and she’s discerning enough to be attracted to Marlowe, despite the fact that she can’t really control him. Marlowe recognizes something worthwhile in her as well.
Brett Halliday’s first novel about Miami PI Mike Shayne, 1939’s Dividend on Death, features one of the most likeable of the spoiled but likeable rich girls: client Phyllis Brighton, who combines an appealing vulnerability with her wealth and likeability. She returns in the second book in the Shayne series, The Private Practice of Michael Shayne, and by the third book, The Uncomplaining Corpses, is married to Shayne, which is ironically the same fate Chandler had in mind for Marlowe in his uncompleted novel, Poodle Springs, in which Marlowe married Linda Loring. Just as Chandler would apparently decide that marriage was not for Marlowe, and put the Poodle Springs manuscript aside, unfinished, Halliday would discover that, for commercial reasons, a married hard-boiled detective was difficult to sell. He ruthlessly killed Phyllis off between books, replacing her with secretary Lucy Hamilton, towards whom Shayne feels romantic inclinations, but never marries.
The Hired Muscle
The hired muscle character was a necessary figure in Chandler’s work; menacing, brutal thugs-for-hire were a staple in his stories, and always on hand to present an obstacle to the hero. As we’ve seen in this course, Chandler’s world is an uneasy place, and Marlowe must necessarily face, and overcome, serious difficulties. Fittingly, Marlowe runs into more than his share of hoods in the employ of one of the big boys. Among them are Poke Andrews, the hired gun he and Ohls shoot it out with in "Finger Man," the sibling gunmen, "Waxnose" and "Frisky," from "Trouble Is My Business," and the mysterious Eastern Seaboard hit men from "The Pencil."
First among equals is Eddie Mars’ top gun in The Big Sleep, Lash Canino. One of the most sinister figures in the entire Marlowe canon, Canino seems almost like a force of nature, there whenever Mars needs him and nowhere to be seen when he’s not needed. Sinister details like his dark, monochromatic wardrobe, and his off-handedly cruel way of dealing out death, add to his stature as an opponent for Marlowe, and when Marlowe kills Canino in the gunfight at the Realito garage, we know it’s an accomplishment that means something.
Hawk, the aforementioned professional thug who sometimes assists Parker’s Spenser, is actually introduced as an opponent of Spenser’s in the 1974 novel Promised Land. In the employ of the main villain (an Eddie Mars-like mobster), he seems, like Canino, to be almost a force of nature, and the question of who might prevail if it comes to a face-to-face showdown between Spenser and Hawk is doubtful. Thankfully, it doesn’t come to that, as Hawk, finally disgusted by his employer’s cowardice, changes sides, setting up the uneasy "partnership" that prevails in subsequent entries in the series.
The Cop Buddy
In most crime fiction, and particularly in private eye fiction, a cop buddy serves as a helpmate to the hero, offering advice, inside information, and sometimes access to crime scenes or other necessary resources. Chandler relied on the cop buddy character type less frequently than other writers. As we’ve seen in The Big Sleep, Marlowe is a loner who interacts with a network of friends and acquaintances only rarely. Chandler went to some lengths to keep Marlowe both autonomous and unconnected, thus bypassing the common mystery device of the recurring cop buddy. Marlowe merely approaches having a full-fledged cop buddy in the character of Ohls.
Ohls is the DA’s chief investigator and he apparently trusts Marlowe; he’s good in a shootout, and he’s honest. As mentioned earlier, we learn in The Big Sleep that Marlowe was once a DA’s man himself and that he and Ohls once worked together. Although Ohls appears again in several short stories and novels, we learn little about him except that he’s a tough cop whom Marlowe respects, and who seems to regard Marlowe as a friend (or at least as much of a friend as a cop and a PI can be).
The cop buddy character type is particularly ubiquitous in private eye fiction. In addition to the aforementioned O’Gar in the Op series, Gentry in the Shayne series, and Quirk and Belson in the Spenser series, famous examples include NYPD Homicide Captain Pat Chambers in Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer series, LAPD Sergeant Dennis Becker on TV’s The Rockford Files, and legendary real-life federal agent Eliot Ness in Max Allan Collins’s series of historical mysteries featuring Depression-era PI Nate Heller.
There are other stock character types found in The Big Sleep and, indeed, throughout Chandler’s work. We see them in "The Police Nemesis," "The Faithful but Mysterious Family Retainer," "The Two-Bit Grifter," and so on. Chandler’s talent isn’t that he uses stock characters, but that he imbues each with enough individuality to keep them from seeming to be the clichéd, overused figures they might be in lesser hands. A skillful turn of dialogue, a neat bit of character description, a personality-revealing piece of action—all serve to make a familiar type of character seem fresh and new.
Lesson 4: The Big Sleep -- Between the Lines
Media Adaptations
The Big Sleep, perhaps Chandler’s best-known and most popular novel, has been the basis for one of the best-known and most popular private eye movies in cinema history. It was also the source material for an ill-advised remake of that classic film more than 30 years later, and, somewhat nostalgically, for a radio drama produced long after the heyday of radio drama had passed. In this section, we’ll discuss who played what roles, how changing times affected the manner in which the book was adapted, and other stylistic changes.
The Gold Standard
Chandler was quite pleased with the 1946 film adaptation of The Big Sleep. "Bogart is so much better than any other tough guy actors," he said. "[He] can be tough without a gun." More than any other actor, Humphrey Bogart, in fedora and trench coat, is identified with the figure of the hard-boiled private eye. Indeed, it’s hard to believe that he played private eyes only twice. But when one of those private eyes is Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon and the other is Philip Marlowe in The Big Sleep, twice is enough.
Chandler was pleased with the 1946 film version of The Big Sleep, starring Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart.
The film also featured Lauren Bacall as Vivian, and the script by William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett, and Jules Furthman followed the original plot and dialogue quite closely.
Some changes, however, were necessary. Bogart, though superb as Marlowe, was not well matched physically to the character as described in the book, and some dialogue reflects the differences. In the book, Carmen greets Marlowe with the line, "Tall, aren’t you?" To which Marlowe replies, "I didn’t try to be." In the movie, the first line of the exchange becomes, "Not very tall, are you?" And Bogart’s reply becomes, "I tried to be."
Some details also had to be softened to get past the censors. Geiger’s pornography shop can only be hinted at, and Carmen (Martha Vickers) is no longer naked in Geiger’s house or Marlowe’s apartment; she’s fully clothed. Rusty Regan, renamed "Sean Regan," is a paid companion employed by General Sternwood, rather than his son-in-law; we are told that he and Marlowe were once friendly enemies on different sides of the law during Regan’s bootlegging days. Vivian is renamed "Mrs. Rutledge," and the number of times she’s been married is reduced, presumably in another concession to the censors.
The biggest changes actually came after principle photography ended. Ms. Bacall’s star was on the rise, and the studio wanted to exploit the well-publicized romance between her and Bogart, so the film’s release was delayed to give the director, legendary filmmaker Howard Hawks, time to reshoot several scenes, and to include new scenes designed to enhance Ms. Bacall’s role. Accordingly, Vivian appears in a lengthened version of the scene in which Marlowe drives Carmen home from the murder scene at Geiger’s house. Toward the end of the film it is Vivian, rather than Mona Mars, who assists Marlowe in the shootout with Canino. And, in an entirely new scene, Marlowe and Vivian exchange suggestive horse-racing banter. Significantly, Bogart’s Marlowe accepts Vivian’s romantic overtures, as both characters admit that they are in love with each other.
London Calling
While Chandler was pleased with the 1946 adaptation of The Big Sleep, we don't know what he would have thought of the 1978 remake starring Robert Mitchum as Marlowe. This was Mitchum’s second appearance as the detective, following his well-received performance in 1975’s Farewell, My Lovely.
Inexplicably, this version of The Big Sleep is set in late 1970’s London. Aside from the dissonant setting, the film is actually a fairly faithful adaptation of the book, more so in some ways than the Bogart version. Oddly, in many respects, this is not to its advantage. In free and easy 1978, for example, it seems ludicrous for a pornographer to be operating behind the front of a rare bookshop. The film’s counterparts to Carmen’s nude scenes from the book actually show Carmen (renamed Camilla for no apparent reason, and played by Candy Clark) nude in the 1978 film, but, curiously, are far less erotic than the fully-clothed scenes with Martha Vickers three decades earlier.
On the Radio
In 1977, just about a year before the release of the Mitchum version of The Big Sleep, BBC radio broadcast a five episode Philip Marlowe radio series starring Ed Bishop in the title role. Where the bulk of the episodes from the NBC and CBS radio shows of the 1940s had been original stories utilizing the Marlowe character, with a small number adapted from Chandler’s short stories, the episodes of the BBC series were all based on Marlowe novels, and the first broadcast was an adaptation of The Big Sleep. Produced by John Tydeman and written by Bill Morrison, the series was well-received in both the UK and in the radio drama-deprived U.S. However, in the United States at least, radio drama was basically a nostalgic memory, and the series, though popular, didn’t have a major impact. Its initial broadcast in Britain, where radio drama remains a regular feature of popular entertainment, did little other than to further cement the appeal Chandler had always had with British audiences.
In this lesson, we’ve seen how Chandler developed and perfected the character types that would become a mainstay of the form. In Lesson 5, we’ll discuss his next novel, Farewell, My Lovely, which Chandler believed was the best of his books. We’ll continue to assess Chandler’s lasting contributions to the genre in terms of language, setting, and pacing, and we’ll decide whether we agree with Chandler’s own judgment of Farewell, My Lovely.
Discussion
Please post your responses to the topics below on the message board.
1. After reading The Big Sleep, what strikes you as most significant about this novel? What did you enjoy most about it? Why do you think critics today consider it an important work?
2. In the 1946 film version of The Big Sleep, Marlowe manages to arrange things so that Eddie Mars gets what he deserves, but in the book, though Canino is taken care of, Mars pretty much walks off free. Which ending do you find more satisfying? Which is more honest?
3. In this lesson, we’ve discussed the importance of character as it relates to our readings. Can you think of other characters in literary fiction that you believe are descendants of Chandler?
4. Now that you have a solid understanding of Chandler’s style, can you think of other authors who owe a debt to Chandler? How will your study of Chandler influence your reading of crime fiction in the future?
Lesson 8: Chandler’s Legacy
"For the basic art of the motion picture is the screenplay; it is fundamental, without it there is nothing. Everything derives from the screenplay, and most of that which derives is an applied skill which, however adept, is artistically not in the same class with the creation of a screenplay. But in Hollywood the screenplay is written by a salaried employee under the supervision of a producer—that is to say, by an employee without power or decision over the uses of his own craft, without ownership of it, and, however extravagantly paid, almost without honor for it."
—Raymond Chandler, "Writers in Hollywood," Atlantic Monthly, November 1945
The period between 1939 and 1943 was Chandler’s most productive as a novelist. From then until his death in 1959, he would only write three more novels. Yet those seven novels (and in particular the first four) set a pattern that mystery writers, especially private eye writers, have faithfully followed ever since. In this lesson, we will examine how Chandler became so influential. We will discuss his work as a screenwriter, and analyze how the screen adaptations of his first four Marlowe novels may have contributed as much to his influence as his prose. We will also trace his legacy in crime fiction by looking at some of the contemporary writers who have followed in his footsteps.
The Aesthetic of Noir
We have studied Chandler’s work, style, and aesthetic, and we have analyzed the evolution of hard-boiled fiction. Now we will discuss the evolution of noir, and learn that while noir and hard-boiled share some similarities, they are not necessarily synonymous. As we've discussed, the French word "noir" has been used most commonly in this country to refer to film. A particular type of gritty, sinister mystery movie is often referred to as a "film noir."
Its use in the context of crime fiction originated with the prestigious French publishing company Gallimard, which, in 1945, began publishing a mystery line called Serie Noir. Serie Noir’s editor, Marcel Duhamel, was an expert in American literature. Consequently, many of the books published under the Serie Noir logo were translations of American hard-boiled crime novels by authors such as Hammett, Jonathan Latimer, and W.R. Burnett. Three of the earliest Serie Noir books were written by Chandler.
Notice the visual style in this poster for The Killers: Is it any surprise that French critics dubbed the new aesthetic "noir"?
Many American crime films produced during and just after the War began to make their way to France. French film critics were struck by the way movies like This Gun for Hire and The Killers effortlessly captured the dark underbelly of urban America. Perhaps because the source novels for many of these films had been published under the Serie Noir imprint, they were eventually dubbed film noir. It’s not precisely clear who first coined this term. At least two well-known French film critics, Nino Frank and Jean-Pierre Chartier, have been credited with originating the phrase. In any case, it was soon a commonly used term among French critics.
Films classified as noir ran a fairly wide gamut of subjects. They included private eye films like The Maltese Falcon and The Dark Corner, gangster films like The Asphalt Jungle and Johnny Eager, semi-documentary cop films like The Naked City and He Walked by Night, "message" pictures like Crossfire and No Way Out, and even romantic suspense movies like Laura and The Spiral Staircase.
These films have in common certain visual flourishes. Invariably black-and-white, noir films tended to use light and shadow in ways that heightened the sense of dread and desperation that characterized the stories. The term began to be used commonly in the United States during the 1970s, nearly a decade after the last films generally regarded as part of the "noir cycle" were released. Driving the end of the noir period in film was the fact that after the mid-1960s, few black-and-white commercial American films were being released. The ambience of noir required the kind of imagery most easily achieved in black-and-white. The popular American recognition of noir films soon led to a re-evaluation of the novels and stories that these films were often based on, and to a new appreciation of the source material.
Literary Noir
In recent publishing jargon, noir has come to be used as a synonym for "hard-boiled," perhaps in the belief that the hard-boiled sub-genre is passé and difficult to sell. But noir, evoking modern European intellectualism, has more appeal.
This may be sound business thinking, but it’s not precisely accurate. As we’ve seen, not all noir fiction, either in prose or in film, is hard-boiled. Nor is all hard-boiled fiction noir. They’re certainly not mutually exclusive, but nor are they precisely identical.
Scholars have noted that many of the films in the noir cycle, particularly those based on the works of James M. Cain, end with the protagonist doomed and lost after a making a series of increasingly unfortunate and ill-advised choices. This suggests that to be truly noir, the story must feature a protagonist who is destined to meet a bad end. But plenty of film noirs, and plenty of the books from which they derive, feature heroes who overcome their obstacles and triumph in the end. So, while doom and pessimism is clearly an element in many stories correctly labeled noir, those can’t be regarded as defining elements because they are missing from too many stories which are also labeled noir, and rightfully so.
For our purposes in this course, we’ve adopted a much simpler definition. If, in the film medium, noir can be defined as a crime movie that achieves a dark, sinister atmosphere through its visual style, then, in literature, noir is a crime story that achieves that dark, sinister atmosphere through prose.
Chandler’s Efforts
As noted in earlier lessons, Chandler always tried to imbue his fiction with what he called "the smell of fear." So, before the term noir had even been coined, Chandler was making a concerted effort to convey the style of noir in his stories and novels. After your extensive reading of Chandler in this course, you can probably think of dozens of passages and scenes that prove him a master of noir. However, particular examples spring to mind.
An obvious example is the opening passage of the short story "Red Wind," in which Chandler sets the mood for the rest of the piece by his description of the hot, dry Santa Ana that runs as a motif through the entire tale. Indeed, in no other work is everything else—plot, character, logic—so subordinated to the atmosphere Chandler is trying to create.
Another prime example is the hospital sequence from Farewell, My Lovely, in which Marlowe must fight his way out of a drug-induced haze to escape the sinister medical facility. Here, Chandler does not quite sacrifice plot and character to atmosphere, as he did in "Red Wind." Indeed, in this sequence, plot, character, and atmosphere are admirably balanced, so that we gain insight into the kind of man Marlowe is, and see the plot move forward in a logical manner, while simultaneously marveling at Chandler’s ability to evoke that fearful scent. Compare the sequence from the novel with its counterpart in the short story, "The Man Who Liked Dogs." Notice that the short story version is effective, but the same sequence in the novel is much richer and more atmospheric.
To many of us, noir is a term better suited to film than to literature. An argument could be made that Chandler, for all his sure-handedness with noir elements in his prose work, is regarded as the master of noir less because of his novels and stories than because of his screenplays. In the next topic, we will discuss Chandler’s screenplays, and analyze how he furthered his stylistic ambitions in this new medium.
Lesson 8: Chandler’s Legacy
Chandler’s Influence
In 1943, Paramount acquired the screen rights to a novel by James M. Cain (another Serie Noir author) called Double Indemnity. In that story, a bored wife and her lover conspire to murder her husband for his life insurance. The project was turned over to director/screenwriter Billy Wilder, who liked the book very much. Unfortunately, Wilder’s most frequent screen-writing partner, Charles Brackett, did not; he refused to have anything to do with the project. As Cain himself was unavailable, the producer suggested bringing in Chandler, a writer whom he thought was similar to Cain, as a collaborator for Wilder.
Chandler would probably have bristled at the notion that he and Cain worked in the same tradition, since he had expressed intense dislike for Cain’s work. In a letter to his publisher, Chandler once described Cain as "a dirty little boy with a piece of chalk and a board fence and nobody looking. Such people are the offal of literature, not because they write about dirty things, but because they write about it in a dirty way."
But Chandler hadn’t yet earned the income that he’d hoped for from his novels, and he accepted a lucrative offer from the studio: $750 per week, for as long as it took to get the script written. Chandler and Wilder were not happy collaborators, as their work styles and personalities were very different. Years later, Chandler described the process of collaborating with Wilder as "an agonizing experience [that] has probably shortened my life," though he added that he had "learned from it as much about screenwriting as I am capable of learning."
Much of the material in the script, by the standards of the day, shouldn’t have gotten past the censors. It is a testament to the skill of Wilder and Chandler that they were able to write about the frank details of a plot in which the main characters were a pair of adulterous murderers in a way that the censors found acceptable. The script that emerged from that collaboration was a winner, as was the film made from it. Directed by Wilder, it starred Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck, and Edward G. Robinson. Enthusiastically received by critics and audiences alike, both the film and the screenplay were nominated for Academy Awards.
Double Indemnity is one of the most famous and best-regarded films of the noir cycle. It launched Chandler’s career as a screenwriter, and made him the flavor of the month in the film industry. As a result, his books were suddenly quite valuable as potential film properties. Between 1945 and 1947, all four of the Marlowe novels written to that point were filmed as "A" pictures.
The Blue Dahlia
Chandler completed his Oscar-nominated script for The Blue Dahlia during a now-famous drinking binge.
Over the next two years, Chandler wrote two more screenplays for Paramount. One was a romantic soap opera called And Now Tomorrow, and the other was a horror film entitled The Unseen. Both were adaptations of popular novels, and neither was the kind of material with which Chandler was identified. But they completed his contractual obligations to the studio.
While working on The Unseen, Chandler developed a close friendship with producer John Houseman. Like Chandler, Houseman had been educated at British public schools, and Chandler sensed that they were like-minded "English gentlemen." Late in 1944, Houseman was given the assignment of quickly putting together a vehicle for Paramount’s number one star, Alan Ladd. It had to be started and completed while Ladd was enjoying a fairly short leave from military duty. Houseman pulled strings and, within two weeks, Chandler was given a $1,000-a-week contract for an original screenplay.
Chandler completed the first half of the script fairly quickly, and shooting commenced immediately. Suddenly, Chandler developed writer’s block. As an incentive, the studio offered an additional $5,000 bonus if Chandler could deliver the completed script on schedule.
The offer had an effect precisely opposite of what was intended. As Houseman described it in an article he wrote entitled "Lost Fortnight" (The World of Raymond Chandler), the offer upset Chandler in three ways. First, Chandler’s faith in himself was destroyed. Secondly, Chandler felt insulted by what he considered a dishonor: to be offered an additional sum of money for the completion of an assignment that he had every intention of fulfilling. And finally, according to Houseman, Chandler was enraged by the suggestion that he should make a deal behind Houseman’s back, in effect betraying a friend.
Chandler did finish the script, in a strange episode of binge drinking. He worked at his house rather than at the studio office. Chauffeurs and secretaries were available around the clock, and nurses were on hand to give him vitamin shots while he wrote and drank.
The film was released to both critical and commercial success, although Chandler was not altogether pleased with editorial changes made to placate the Navy. Moreover, he was critical of some of the cast members, including Ladd. In his more charitable moments, he referred to Veronica Lake as "Miss Moronica Lake." Of the director, George Marshall, he said "[he] had been thirty years in Hollywood without ever doing a first class job," though he did admit, "in fairness," that he’d never done one that was truly bad, either.
In the end, with what seemed like weary resignation, Chandler pronounced The Blue Dahlia "no classic, but no dud either." He earned a second Academy Award nomination for his script, and The Blue Dahlia, like Double Indemnity, is now considered a benchmark in the history of film noir.
Other Screen Projects
The Blue Dahlia completed Chandler’s contract with Paramount. He then went to MGM to work on an adaptation of his own novel, The Lady in the Lake, but said he disliked the process of adapting his own work to another medium because working with familiar material was boring; this is ironic, considering that three of his four novels had been cannibalized from his short stories. Chandler wasn’t able to finish the script before his contract expired, and it was turned over to journeyman screenwriter Steve Fisher to complete. Chandler was very displeased with the planned treatment planned for the film, in which Marlowe, in effect, would become the camera. When the film was released, Chandler was credited with authorship of the source material, but he refused credit for the screenplay. Fisher alone received credit for the script.
Chandler was later approached by Warner Brothers about adapting Patricia Highsmith’s novel, Strangers on a Train, for legendary director Alfred Hitchcock. In the interim, he had written the fifth Marlowe novel, The Little Sister, which is perhaps the most searing depiction of the film industry to be found in his fiction. His distaste for Hollywood had not abated, but he accepted—partly, he later said, for the chance to work with Hitchcock. The collaboration was not a happy one. Hitchcock and Chandler were different kinds of storytellers, and their styles did not mesh. In the end, Chandler was replaced with Czenzi Ormande (with whom he eventually shared screen credit). According to some sources, though he was credited as a co-writer, little of his script survived after Omande’s revisions. Neither Chandler nor Hitchcock spoke of the other with fondness after their stint of working together.
Chandler’s Final Years
Strangers on a Train was Chandler’s last screenplay. In "Writers in Hollywood," an article published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1945, Chandler described the indignities suffered by screenwriters in the most caustic of terms. "The making of a picture ought to be a rather fascinating adventure," he wrote. "It is not; it is an endless contention of tawdry egos, some of them powerful, almost all of them vociferous, and almost none of them capable of anything much more creative than credit-stealing and self-promotion." It’s unlikely that his experiences with either the unproduced script for Playback, or the produced but severely altered scripts for Lady and Strangers, changed his opinion for the better.
Over the next few years, Chandler nursed his wife Cissy, who was slowly dying of a debilitating illness, while simultaneously working on his most ambitious novel, The Long Goodbye. This book, the first Marlowe novel in a half-dozen years, appeared in Great Britain in November 1953 and in the United States the following January. A bit more than a year after the book’s British publication, Cissy passed away. The years after Cissy’s death were marked by a tragic cycle of drinking binges, suicide attempts, and joyless affairs.
After The Long Goodbye, Chandler was able to complete one more book, a thin 1958 volume entitled Playback. This was a novelization of the unproduced Universal screenplay into which he inserted Philip Marlowe. The book ended with Marlowe making arrangements for a romantic encounter with Linda Loring, the wealthy divorcée he’d met in The Long Goodbye. It is generally regarded as the weakest entry in the series.
Chandler started one more book, Poodle Springs, in which (apparently at the suggestion of English mystery writer Maurice Guinness) he married Marlowe off to Loring, but evidently thought better of it. After four chapters, Chandler put the manuscript aside, writing to Guinness in February of 1959 that "a fellow of Marlowe’s type shouldn’t get married, because he is a lonely man, a poor man, a dangerous man, and yet a sympathetic man, and somehow none of this goes with marriage."
Instead of saddling Marlowe with Loring in a novel, Chandler wrote a short story, eventually published as "The Pencil," in which he brought back Anne Riordan, the "nice girl" from Farewell, My Lovely, as a potential romantic partner for Marlowe. After a nearly two decade absence, she was still only 28 (and still a virgin). This was the last Marlowe project Chandler managed to complete. On March 23, having contracted pneumonia, Chandler was admitted to the Scripps Clinic in La Jolla, California. He died there three days later.
"The Pencil," published under the title "Marlowe Takes on the Syndicate," appeared the following month in the London Daily Mail. Philip Marlowe had managed to outlive his creator.
Lesson 8: Chandler’s Legacy
Mysteries Today
Chandler has been called the most influential mystery writer of the 20th century, not without justification. Certainly, he is the most influential, or at least the most emulated, in the mystery subgenre of the hard-boiled private eye story.
However, when one considers that he was not the first private eye writer, and that at least one of his predecessors, Hammett, was, arguably, just as superlative a talent, the depth and breadth of Chandler’s influence might seem a bit difficult to explain.
"The Marlowe Paradigm"
One of the most obvious manifestations of Chandler’s influence is Marlowe’s emergence as the archetype of the private eye. Consider the following character traits: unmarried, male, American, ex-cop, 30 to 40 years old, owns and operates his own one-man agency, works in a large American city, and tells his stories in the first person.
Humphrey Bogart, as Marlowe in The Big Sleep, embodied many of the characteristics we now think of as central to the tough, lone private eye character.
That’s a pretty good encapsulated description of Marlowe. Significantly, it’s also a pretty good capsule description of most of the hard-boiled private eye characters created since Marlowe. Conservatively, we can estimate that 60 percent of all fictional, post-Marlowe private eyes fit that eight-point description in every respect, and most of the rest fit that description in all but one or two respects.
Some might argue that these are only surface details, that Chandler’s true influence lies deeper, in his attempt—his largely successful attempt—to turn a fictional genre held in low esteem into a vehicle for truly artistic writing. And there’s justice to this assertion.
But influence manifests itself in surface details, and it’s remarkable that the archetype of what a hard-boiled private detective is comes to us not from Hammett, who was the innovator, who was arguably just as talented, and who actually knew what being a private detective was really like, but from Chandler, who came later and who had no first-hand experience in the profession.
When we think of a private eye, it’s not the operative of a large world-wide agency that comes to mind; it’s the lone wolf in his shabby office barely eking out a living. It’s not the spare, stripped-down ruthlessly objective third person style that we associate with the PI; rather, it’s the more personal, elegiac, poetic first-person style. It’s not the hard-nosed professional who can sleep with a woman one day and turn her over to the cops the next that’s our prototype of the private eye; it’s the slightly tarnished modern-day knight errant, forever on the lookout for a damsel in distress to rescue.
Perhaps Marlowe’s status as the PI archetype stems from this last point: his embodiment of the knightly virtues of chivalry and honor. Hammett’s protagonists might do heroic things, but they do them because it is their job. They might operate by a code, but it is largely unspoken, and on the rare occasions when attempts are made to explain it, they are as remarkable for what is left unsaid as for what is said. The Op might say, "I’m a detective because I happen to like the work." Sam Spade would say, "When a man’s partner is killed he’s supposed to do something about it." By contrast, Marlowe agonizes over his chosen profession not being "a game for knights." The Op and Spade are concerned with getting the job done; we could say that they’re results-oriented. Marlowe is concerned with doing the right thing; we could say that he’s more process-oriented.
Heroism is a more attractive quality than professional competence, and this might explain why Marlowe, rather than the Op or Spade, is the model subsequent writers have tended to follow.
At the Movies
In a 1948 letter to fellow mystery writer Cleve F. Adams, Chandler remarked on the fact that he seemed to have replaced Hammett as the leading proponent of hard-boiled crime fiction.
Since Hammett has not written for publication since 1932, I have been picked out by some people as the leading representative of the school. This is very likely due to the fact that The Maltese Falcon did not start the high budget mystery picture trend, although it ought to have. Double Indemnity and Murder, My Sweet did, and I was associated with both of them. The result is that everybody who used to be accused of writing like Hammett may now be accused of trying to write like Chandler.
Chandler made an excellent point here. Movies have a more immediate and farther-reaching impact on popular culture than novels. It’s very likely, for example, that more people have seen the film Gone With the Wind than have read Margaret Mitchell’s novel, and few who read the book now can do so without having the film cast in mind as they conjure images of the book’s characters.
And Chandler, as he says, was associated with high-budget films. The films made from his books were made as "A" pictures. And because of the way he sold those books, one at a time rather than all in a group, different studios bought the rights to different books, and subsequently made different Marlowe pictures.
This was in sharp contrast to the way most mystery film series featuring a continuing character were made at the time. The common practice was for a studio to buy the rights to all the books featuring a character, as well as rights to the character himself, and release a series of quickly made, low-budget "B" films featuring the same cast in picture after picture. Warner Oland was identified with 20th Century Fox’s Charlie Chan, Basil Rathbone with Universal’s Sherlock Holmes, Ralph Bellamy with Columbia’s Ellery Queen, and so on. When the studios ran out of original material to adapt, they’d simply commission original screenplays featuring that character, having bought the rights to the character as well as the stories in which he appeared.
The films made from Chandler’s four Marlowe novels followed a different, and unique, path; produced by different studios, they each used a different actor in the pivotal role of Marlowe. Between 1945 and 1947, audiences did not see several low-budget movies with a single interpretation of the Marlowe character, but four very different high-budget interpretations of that character. At the same time, each of the films, 1945’s Murder, My Sweet (RKO), 1946’s The Big Sleep (Warner’s), and 1947’s The Lady in the Lake (MGM) and The Brasher Doubloon (Fox), adhered, with a fair amount of faithfulness, to Chandler’s vision of the character.
Investigation:
Analyzing Noir
In this lesson, we’ve discussed Chandler’s contributions to the aesthetic of noir. Illustrate your understanding of the concept by thinking of an additional example of noir fiction. You may choose literature or film. Post your choice to the message board, and explain your reasons for selecting this work.
Seeing the same character being given different, but still valid and faithful, interpretations over a short period of time probably went a long way to creating in audiences the expectation that a hard-boiled private eye character was a character who was supposed to be just like Philip Marlowe, because the movies showed that a character could be just like Philip Marlowe and yet be different. Writers, in a variety of mediums, created PI characters (very often deliberately) in the image and likeness of Marlowe.
Marlowe’s Disciples
Of course, the best of the private eye writers who followed in Chandler’s wake were able to use that paradigm as a launch point. Bart Spicer’s Philadelphia PI, Carney Wilde, meets all of the eight-points in the pattern described above, but Wilde added two additional traits: ambition and business savvy. Science fiction writer Milton Lesser, who adopted the Chandlerian pseudonym Stephen Marlowe for his private eye novels (and eventually took it as his legal name), also followed the paradigm in every respect, adding in an element of world travel. Thomas B. Dewey’s Mac added compassion for children; Ed Lacy’s Toussaint Moore was the first black private eye in fiction, predating Ernest Tidyman’s John Shaft by more than a dozen years. Michael Collins’s Dan Fortune was physically handicapped. Lawrence Block’s Matt Scudder struggled with alcoholism and guilt from a bad shooting back in his cop days. But, at least in the beginning, they all followed the Chandler pattern.
The Chandler pattern was so pervasive in PI fiction that, in 1988, an anthology of new Marlowe stories was proposed; they would be written by contemporary PI writers as an homage to celebrate Chandler’s centenary. One critic wryly observed that writing Marlowe stories seemed to be what most of the contributors were already doing anyway.
One of the most interesting things about that anthology, Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, edited by Byron Preiss, is the degree to which the contributors approached Marlowe as a blank slate on whom they could impose their own notions of characterization, themes, and storytelling techniques. Hence, Max Allan Collins, who writes historical private eye novels based on famous real-life crimes, fictionalized a real life crime and had Marlowe solve it. Midwestern law professor Francis M. Nevins wrote a story in which Marlowe travels to the Midwest and gets involved in a case that turns on an interpretation of probate law. Native New Yorker Robert J. Randisi brought Marlowe to the Big Apple for an adventure set in Manhattan’s Grand Central Station, while Mexican mystery writer Pablo Ignacio Taibo II brought Marlowe south of the border. Edward D. Hoch, best-known for short stories featuring classically skull-crushing puzzles, involved Marlowe with a classic puzzle. And Roger L. Simon, whose Moses Wine novels are marked by an unabashedly left-wing sensibility, wrote Marlowe into a story promoting his political views. Marlowe’s iconic status had allowed him to become whatever those writers wanted him to become.
Ross Macdonald
As we mentioned earlier in the course, Hammett, Chandler, and Ross Macdonald are considered the triumvirate of authors of hard-boiled fiction. (It became such a cliché for reviewers to refer to a private eye novel as being written "in the tradition of Hammett, Chandler, and Macdonald," that the idea was even spoofed by Charles Schulz in his Peanuts comic strip.) Ross Macdonald (the pen name of Kenneth Millar), is the author of the acclaimed Lew Archer novels.
Like Chandler, Macdonald became fascinated by the literary possibilities in American colloquial language. But where Chandler had been inspired by Hammett, Macdonald was inspired by Chandler. Indeed, he admitted that Lew Archer "was patterned on Chandler’s Marlowe." (Though, in a tip of the hat to Hammett, he named his detective character after Sam Spade’s murdered partner, Miles Archer.)
Robert B. Parker
Currently, the single most successful private eye writer is former literature professor Robert B. Parker, whose doctoral dissertation was devoted to Hammett and Chandler. And the most successful fictional detective is Parker’s creation, Boston PI Spenser. Parker, like Macdonald, was completely upfront about his debt to Chandler, admitting that he started writing the Spenser novels because Chandler hadn’t written enough Marlowe novels.
Parker has actually written two Marlowe novels. He completed Chandler’s unfinished novel, Poodle Springs. Reviews were mixed, but the book was successful enough that Chandler’s estate commissioned Parker to do a second, wholly original, Marlowe novel the following year. 1990’s Perchance to Dream was a direct sequel to The Big Sleep, involving Marlowe a second time in the troubles and travails of the Sternwood sisters.
Loren D. Estleman
Parker may have been the man the Chandler estate tagged to continue Marlowe’s adventures, but many would have said that the best-qualified was former journalist Loren D. Estleman. His novels about Detroit PI Amos Walker, beginning with 1980’s Motor City Blue, have probably come closer to approximating Chandler’s gift for vivid writing and crisp dialogue than any other contemporary mystery writer. His depiction of contemporary Detroit and the surrounding metropolitan area rivals Chandler’s portrait of Southern California. A former art student, Estleman was impressed with Chandler’s ability to draw striking imagery through the use of similes and metaphors. And perhaps no current writer is as adept at the use of Chandler-like imagery as Estleman. Also, like the characters Archer and Spenser, Walker follows the paradigm in every respect.
Estleman, like Macdonald and Parker, has been totally forthright about Chandler’s influence. "I continue to reread all his fiction," he has said, "using it as a sort of lodestone to remind me where I came from and how far I have to go."
Max Allan Collins
Max Allan Collins is perhaps best known for writing the Dick Tracy comic strip for a dozen years, and for writing the graphic novel Road to Perdition. Of course, this is the same story on which the critically acclaimed gangster picture Road to Perdition was based. One of the first successful mystery writers of the "Baby Boom" generation, Collins has garnered his best critical notices for a series of historical private eye novels, set from the Depression through the early 1960s, featuring Chicago private investigator Nate Heller. Each book or short story involves Heller in a famous real-life crime or mystery, such as the Lindbergh kidnapping, the hunt for John Dillinger, the assassination of Huey Long, and the disappearance of Amelia Earhart. Collins’ stated purpose in the series is to explore these factual incidents through the prism of a Chandler-inspired private eye, "a Philip Marlowe type," as he put it. In his first appearance, 1983’s True Detective, Heller follows the Marlowe paradigm in every respect save age (he’s only 25 in that novel). Fittingly, the decades that Heller spent in the detective business, from the early 1930s to the late 1950s and early 1960s, roughly parallel the decades that Chandler spent writing about Marlowe.
Sue Grafton
The most noteworthy change in private eye fiction over the last two decades has been the introduction of female characters. Tough, hard-nosed, thoroughly professional but female detectives like Marcia Muller’s Sharon McCone, Sara Paretsky’s V.I. Warshawski, and Maxine O’Callahan’s Delilah West have become forces to reckon with in PI fiction. It’s possible that more PI novels currently being published feature female characters rather than male ones.
What’s most interesting about these woman sleuths is how many of them, while appearing to be wholly innovative, nevertheless follow the Marlowe paradigm in every respect save gender. Perhaps the most popular of the female PI’s, Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Milhone, is a case in point. Unmarried, in her early 30s, and a veteran of stints on both the Santa Teresa Police Department and the Investigation Division of the Santa Teresa County Public Defender’s Office, Milhone operates her own, one-woman agency in a town that, if not quite a major metropolitan center in its own right, is part of the huge Southern California megalopolis that has Los Angeles at its center. "Santa Teresa," by the way, is a slightly fictionalized version of Santa Barbara, and was so dubbed by Ross Macdonald in the first Lew Archer novel, The Moving Target. By using that name for Milhone’s base of operations, Grafton pays homage to those authors who have gone before her. Finally, Milhone tells her story in a highly engaging first-person style, deliberately reminiscent of Chandler and the rest of his disciples.
Media Adaptations
In 1969, Chandler’s iconic sleuth returned to the big screen, in color for the first time, in an adaptation of The Little Sister entitled Marlowe, released by MGM. James Garner, a close physical match to the character with a wry sense of comic timing that suited Marlowe’s ironic demeanor, stepped into the detective’s shoes for this outing.
The Little Sister was also adapted for the comic book medium in a 1997 publication written and illustrated by Michael Lark. Set in the 1940s, the graphic novel is a more faithful version of the novel, retaining much of the original narration and dialogue.
United Artist’s 1973 release of The Long Goodbye is the most unusual adaptation in terms of approach. Starring Elliot Gould and directed by Robert Altman, the script was written by Leigh Brackett. Marlowe is no longer presented as a slightly tarnished knight errant; he’s an ineffectual, impotent nebbish. As the film was being prepared, Altman reportedly described his approach this way: "I see Marlowe [as] . . . a loser . . . a real loser, not the fake winner Chandler made out of him. A loser all the way." That’s precisely how the film depicts him. For that reason, many Chandler aficionados roundly despise the film. But it does have its defenders, and a surprising number of them are also Chandler devotees.
Now that we’ve read and analyzed Chandler’s novels and short stories, his style, his aesthetic, his poetic sensibility, his characters, and his major themes, we can see all of the ways in which he has contributed to noir fiction. Chandler remains important not just for what he wrote, but for the effect that his writing had on those who came after him. Every mystery writer who ever sent a tough private eye on an adventure down a city’s mean streets in the search for hidden truth owes a debt to Chandler. So complete is Chandler’s influence that it’s become almost subliminal, part of our collective "pop culture" DNA.
Significantly, every mystery writer working today owes a debt to Chandler for all he did to raise a genre that was so debased to a level of literary respectability. Chandler set a standard of excellence to which all crime writers, whatever their subgenre, can aspire.
Discussion
Please consider the following questions, and post your responses to the message board.
1. In your opinion, is Chandler’s pervasive influence on the private-eye genre positive or negative? Does it continue to inspire writers to do their best, or does it lock them into a straitjacketed format?
2. Did Chandler’s particularly visual prose style serve him well as a screenwriter?
3. Is Chandler’s particularly visual prose style the main element in his ability to set mood, to imbue his stories with a dark and sinister atmosphere? Please share your thoughts.
4. After studying these lectures and Chandler’s books, along with other crime fiction with which you may be familiar, how would you define noir?
